AEO is a Team Sport: Finding Success in a New Search Playing Field

I recently sat in on a webinar with Guy Yalif, Chief Evangelist Officer at Webflow, and it changed how I'm thinking about a few of our strategies. The topic was Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): how brands show up, or don't, when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another LLM a question.

SEO rules have applied for years. AEO plays by different ones.

A recent G2 report found that 51% of B2B buyers now start their shortlist research in an answer engine rather than a search engine, and 69% said they'd actually switched vendors based on who showed up in an LLM's response. That's not a small shift. It's the buying journey itself moving somewhere new, and a lot of brands are still building strategies around the old map.

As we think about this new playing field, and all the moving parts in finding success, here’s where I’d start.

The Landscape Is Shifting, But the Fundamentals Still Count

The biggest misconception is that teams have to overhaul their priorities when it comes to search and brand visibility. AEO isn't erasing the work brands have done in SEO. It's building on it, and in some ways making the basics matter more, not less.

Webflow ran an assessment across a couple thousand sites and found the median company scored a 2 out of 5 on their AEO maturity scale (1 being "good SEO," 5 being "good AEO"). The gaps weren't exotic. 62% of sites had too many broken internal links, 60% were missing basic SEO metadata like titles and descriptions, and 54% haven't refreshed even a tenth of their content in the last six months.

So before chasing anything flashy, there's real ground to gain just by cleaning up what teams already know how to do.

AEO Is a Team Sport. And That's Exactly How We Work.

One thing Yalif said stuck with me: Today’s SEO tends to live with one team, but AEO touches everyone. Whether it’s content and product marketing, engineering and product for the technical side, brand and PR for authority, and ops and analytics for measurement, all teams have stake in the game.

That's genuinely how we approach it at Greenough already. We're not treating AEO as a single deliverable or a checkbox for one department.

We're looking at content and technical optimization side by side with PR initiatives that build the kind of brand mentions and consensus these models are actually looking for.

Yalif pointed out that LLMs are essentially searching for agreement across sources, and that means every plain-text mention of a brand elsewhere, even without a link, reinforces what the model "knows" about that brand. That's a PR and comms play as much as it's an SEO one, and it's why strategies that are built to work across disciplines have a real advantage right now.

Closing the Loop: Measurement Is Where the Real Work Starts

The part of the conversation I keep coming back to is measurement, because it's where AEO stops being theoretical. Webflow's data showed that going from a maturity score of 1 to 3 (the midpoint) corresponded with 2.3 times more mentions and 3.7 times more citations. That's a meaningful jump for what sounds like fundamentals-level work.

There is also real value in treating AEO the way we already treat paid media or conversion rate optimization:

1. Gather data
2. Test changes
3. Implement
4. Measure again
5. Repeat

It's the same closed-loop process brands have built their reporting around for years, now it’s about widening the aperture to include a new set of questions:

• How often does a client show up in the answers their prospects are actually asking?
• Is what's being said about them accurate?

If there's one takeaway I want to bring back to our client work, it's this: AEO isn't a separate initiative bolted onto what we're already doing. It's an extension of it, and it rewards the teams willing to keep testing, keep measuring, and keep collaborating across content, technical, and PR functions rather than treating any one of them as "someone else's job."

The buyers have already moved. The question is how quickly we adjust the strategy to meet them there.

Looking to level up your AEO strategy and brand visibility? Talk with us today.

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